Massaging Your Soul

I felt a nap coming on, but I was late for class. I should be totally upfront here and confess that the class was on sleeping. For $75 and an hour and a half of my day, a registered nurse named Sheryl went through a few pro tips on how to get the most restful seven hours possible.

We all need a sleep plan, she told the class of about eight of us, guests at a desert oasis outside Tucson called Miraval, most of them women in their 50s and 60s. We make plans for eating, exercise and our workdays. So why not for something we spend a third of our lives doing?

As Sheryl was going through a checklist of things we needed to do and not do to ensure better rest — do expose yourself to natural sunlight; do not look at any lighted screens like iPads, smartphones or television sets less than an hour before bedtime — I started to realize that I had spent much of the last week on my vacation to Arizona in a state of repose. Rest wasn’t something I was in need of, and the same was probably true for most of the people I encountered that week.

There was the Restorative Yoga class I took at the Mii amo spa in Sedona that basically consisted of lying on the floor for an hour. One woman gave up halfway in, propped herself up on the wall and just went to sleep.

There was the two-hour Desert Gemstone Ritual that I had at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain outside Tucson, which included a foot rub, an hourlong full-body massage and a 20-minute soak in warm, lavender-oiled bathwater.

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The idea behind the Equine Experience at Miraval near Tucson is for participants to learn to manage anxiety and tension by cleaning a horse’s hoof.CreditMiraval

Then there was Floating Meditation at Miraval, a sublime experience that involved lying in a silk hammock while the instructor rocked me like a baby and played sonorous harmonies on crystal singing bowls.

“It’s O.K. if you fall asleep,” she told the class. “But if you start snoring, I will have to wake you up,” she added, upholding what seemed to be one of Miraval’s most sacred tenets: No one’s relaxation should disturb anyone else’s.

Arizonans like to brag of the state’s five C’s, copper, cotton, cattle, citrus and climate. There should be a sixth: convalescence. The state has a booming economy of resorts and spas that cater to people seeking relaxation, restoration and a little Zen reassurance that everything will be just fine.

It has become such a big business, in fact, that it can be hard to trace the earthy, modest roots in the culture of self-improvement that became so popular with places like Canyon Ranch and Miraval when they first opened. Canyon Ranch started out in 1979 as a Tucson fat farm. It now has branches with full spa services in Lenox, Mass.; Las Vegas; Miami Beach; and aboard the Queen Mary 2. Miraval was the creation of a health-care services company when it started welcoming guests in 1995. It advertised itself as the place for a “life balancing, stress management vacation experience.” It is still all that, just now under the ownership of Steve Case, the AOL co-founder, with rates that will easily set you back $1,500 per night for two people. Now, too, the place has the taint of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” which filmed an episode at Miraval last year, much to the horror of the spa’s regulars.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into resort and spa construction in Arizona in the last few years, and the results are high-end properties that feel far more Four Seasons than Betty Ford. In the most recent phase of its ongoing expansion, Miraval opened a sleek new spa in 2012.The Ritz-Carlton’s Dove Mountain property opened in 2009 with a price tag that approached $300 million. (You may recognize it as the spot where NBC’s “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie was just married.)

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A labyrinth at Miraval is used as an aid to meditation.CreditJohn Burcham for The New York Times

Enchantment Resort, which houses Mii amo, finished up a $25 million face-lift in 2012. Even Arizona’s grandes dames like the Phoenician and the Biltmore have had extensive work done in the last few years. No one can afford to appear a little frayed around the edges with such competition.

At the same time that these spas are spending fortunes on their own exteriors, they have thoroughly embraced treatments that focus as much on your inner well-being as your outer blemishes. Spa and activities menus are studded with bizarre-sounding services like Past-life Regression, a form of hypnosis; Interactive Aura Photography, an analysis of your energy field; and the Equine Experience, a group session in which you learn to manage anxiety and tension by cleaning a horse’s hoof. These days you don’t go to an Arizona spa to emerge with a glow, unless it’s a spiritual one. My partner, Brendan, and I spent a week dipping into these resorts, sampling the newest and most intriguing options we could find — some wonderfully decadent, some genuinely revelatory on a personal level, and others that we should have skipped.

Our first stop was at Enchantment, which was probably the most physically beautiful of the three properties we visited. The resort occupies 70 meticulously maintained acres inside one of the red rock canyons for which Sedona is so famous. The Mii amo spa is actually its own oasis within Enchantment, with its own hotel, pool and restaurant that all guests of the resort are free to use — as long as they purchase one of the pricey treatments.

It’s the kind of place where people are urged to write down their worries and discard them, literally and symbolically, in a wicker basket. (The staff burns them, I was assured.) The most popular attire for guests at all times of day seemed to be one of the spa’s plush robes. We saw a very unburdened-looking Susan Sarandon lounging in the hot tub one afternoon.

My first treatment was something called the Dosha Balancing Wrap, a detoxifying and cleansing therapy that drew from the traditions of ayurvedic medicine, an ancient science developed on the Indian subcontinent.

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The color scheme at Mii amo reflects the canyons.CreditJohn Burcham for The New York Times

My therapist explained what was going on every step of the way. First I had to smell a few different oils and choose the one my body responded to best. I picked a peppery-scented one called Vata, which she said was made locally by a company that does work for Deepak Chopra.

She ran brushes all over my body then rubbed in the oil with her hands. Next she got out a bunch of hot towels that had been soaked in herbal tea, which she wrapped around me, “like a burrito,” she said. And for 20 minutes or so she just scratched me behind my ears as though I was a house cat. It was wonderful.

I was less impressed with my next treatment, the Psychic Massage.

It was neither psychic nor much of a massage. “I don’t see into the future or anything like that,” my therapist told me when I asked him to elaborate on what supernatural powers he might possess. He was more like a $250-an-hour life coach who happened to have good hands, which he ran lightly over my arms, legs, lower back and abdomen. He said he did this to get a better read of my energy. And when he was done, he reported, “There’s nothing wrong with you, Jeremy.” He reassured me I was just sensitive.

Brendan, a dermatologist, generously agreed that in our division of the hard, research-intensive labor, he would focus on the skin care offerings. He started with something Mii amo called the Journeyman’s Facial. It got off to a rough start. “Dermatologists have a tendency to prescribe something and then say ‘See you in a year!’ without really looking closely at your skin,” the woman providing his treatment told him, unaware of his profession. At the end of the session, which included some uncomfortable pimple popping, having steam blown in his face and a pumpkin mask followed by a pineapple scrub, he was presented with a list of all the products used on him. As if the $160 cost weren’t enough (that’s before tipping), he was being urged to pick up a thimble of $90 eye cream on his way out the door.

He had a lot better luck at Mii amo with his astrology reading. At $250 for an hour, it certainly wasn’t cheap. The astrologist, a very friendly and encouraging woman, reassured him about his Libra tendencies. He may be indecisive, but he is grounded, balanced and warm, she said. She prepared him to expect an identity change sometime in April, which sounded somewhat alarming but, she promised, would actually be quite subtle. She also told him he liked massages. (How convenient!)

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Ritz-Carlton’s Dove Mountain property, near Tucson.CreditJohn Burcham for The New York Times

He found the whole experience entertaining, though he became slightly deflated after another hotel guest from Louisiana told him, “I could take you to New Orleans and get that done for $7.”

One of the best parts of the Mii amo experience was just soaking in the surroundings. The spa building itself is a glorious sanctuary about five minutes’ walk from the main resort lobby. (The staff will happily ferry you over by golf cart upon request.) Brendan and I spent hours on the daybeds by the indoor pool, reading as the rush of a waterfall blocked out any other sounds. In the treatment rooms were skylights and panoramic windows, so you could gaze up at the red rock cliffs as you drifted off into a state of semiconsciousness.

Our next stop was a three-and-a-half hour drive south to the Tucson area, where we checked into the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain. It was less of a true spa getaway than the Miraval or Mii amo and more of a full-service resort with country club trappings like golf and swimming.

But the Ritz’s spa was probably the most elegant we visited that week. It’s just a few years old and is so well kept that it still looks brand-new. The locker rooms are done in soothing cream tones, and the soft lighting is enough to ease you into a relaxed state. The spa has its own saltwater infinity pool surrounded by canopied sun beds and tall, multiarmed saguaro cactuses. It is so idyllic, so removed from the bustle of the main resort that it feels like a little boutique within the vast, 850-acre Ritz compound.

The treatment rooms are all connected to an open-air courtyard. The one I had was the size of a large one-bedroom apartment and had two fireplaces — one inside and one out on a private terrace. There was a bathtub the size of a Mini Cooper.

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A private villa pool at Miraval.CreditJohn Burcham for The New York Times

I opted for the Desert Gemstone Ritual because it sounded the most unusual. In fact, the Ritz menu was light on the New Age offerings that the other spas had, though my treatment did begin with reaching my hand into a large bowl and withdrawing a guide stone. With my eyes closed, I chose an amethyst, which was presented to me in a little bag at the end of the massage — a token freebie $245 later, plus tip.

My therapist first met me outside the men’s locker room with a cup of warm tea. Inside the treatment room, she had a footbath waiting for me and asked me to carefully test it for warmth. “Just dip a toe in,” she said.

The whole treatment, which lasted almost two hours, including the 30 minutes or so I had to myself in the bath, consisted of a sugar scrub foot rub, a full-body exfoliating rubdown and a deep tissue massage. Her hands were so efficient and her motions so perfectly in sync, at times it felt as if I was being worked on by a machine.

The extravagance of the experience almost felt silly, like when she set down a path of towels from the massage table to the tub so my feet wouldn’t have to touch the floor. Then there was the inevitable upsell. She asked if I wanted to “enhance” my service with a scalp massage for $25. I declined. The massage ended with her placing the crystal on my forehead in a symbolic gesture for clarity. “Your third eye,” she said.

We saved Miraval for our last stop, knowing it would probably be the most memorable, given its reputation as the place where Oprah and Ellen go to recharge. We started our first of two days and nights there with the famed Equine Experience. The point was not to learn to ride the horse but to treat him as a kind of therapist. We were skeptical of the abilities of a horse to teach us much about dealing with anxiety, tension or resolving conflicts. But it ended up being quite a revealing two hours.

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Garden at Mii amo spa.CreditJohn Burcham for The New York Times

After a quick stop at the juice and smoothie bar, which is free to guests and one of the better perks we enjoyed on our trip, the staff packed eight of us into a van and drove us off the grounds of the resort to its stables. The first thing we noticed after taking our seats in a little circle was the Kleenex box. Carolyn, our guide, assured us that it was O.K. if we didn’t cry.

The way it worked was Carolyn showed us how to squeeze the back of the horse’s leg in just the right spot to get him to lift his hoof so we could then scrape it with a little cleaning tool. This took some perseverance and patience, since the horse usually responds to cues from the human’s body language. So if you aren’t confident, attentive and careful, the horse just ignores you.

Carolyn chided Brendan after he started laughing nervously at his inability to get the horse to respond. “Laughter is just a defense mechanism, and it solves nothing,” she told him. Re-approach the horse and communicate what you want. It worked.

Once I got my horse to lift his foot, he started to struggle. My impulse was to let go of him. But Carolyn said to stick with it. Just like any conflict, you want to see it through. Then it came time to walk the horse. I guided him out into the middle of the ring. Then he stopped suddenly. What did I do wrong, I wondered urgently? What character flaw did he detect in me? Nothing, it turned out. He just had to relieve himself.

Guests at Miraval could spend a week taking self-actualization classes like these. They are given resort credits to use toward spa treatments and sessions like the Equine Experience. Our package gave us each $150 per day, which got eaten up rather quickly.

There were classes on “mindful stress mastery” and the “ABCs of emotional intelligence.” You could do all kinds of yoga, like Floating Yoga, which was taught in the same silk hammocks as my floating meditation exercise.

The sleeping class I took, called Are You Sleeping?, was full of useful advice like never, ever under any circumstances look at the clock if you get up in the middle of the night. I did something called Naga in which my massage therapist walked over parts of my lower body, using silk scarves suspended from the ceiling to adjust the amount of pressure she was exerting. This cost was a staggering $215 for 50 minutes. (There is no tipping at the resort.)

You could be as carefree with your money as you wanted. But Miraval could be a bit of a nudge when it came to conservation. In our room there was a sign we could hang on the doorknob that said: “I have made a CHOICE today to reuse my linen and terry products to promote water conservation in the desert.”

The biggest indulgence for me at Miraval was actually the $265 Mindful Massage, which was billed as a way “to align bodywork with visualization for a deepening body awareness.” I still have no idea what that meant. But the massage was enough to put me in a state of delirium.

The therapist used a series of hot and cool stones all over my body combined with some light and medium hand work on areas of the body that don’t usually get a lot of attention during massages, like the pectoral muscles and belly. She guided me to focus on taking deep breaths that I could feel all the way into my lower abdomen.

The experience was so intoxicating that at one point while she was massaging my chest and rotating my right arm in a kind of cranking motion I became convinced that my left arm was back in the hotel room. I began to panic, thinking that she wouldn’t be able to massage it.

Later that night, our last in Arizona for the week, we met an older couple from Ohio at the bar as we were waiting for our table. They had been coming to Miraval almost every year since it opened and had watched it evolve. They said they could remember the days when there was no bar, and no $18 glasses of wine because, first, the resort didn’t even serve alcohol and, second, there was no need for a place to wait for a table because it never got that crowded.

The bar and the dining room were packed. The table of free hors d’oeuvres had been picked clean. And judging by the number of people drinking $20 cocktails, the relaxation would go on well after the spa closed for the day.

Jeremy W. Peters is a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The New York Times.